confusion

Southeast Asia is in the middle of a heat wave. Singapore is not really that much hotter, it’s still hovering around 30-32° every day. But in the mornings, when I go out before six AM with my daughter to catch the bus, I get hit with a blast of hot, sticky air the moment I open the door. It does not cool down overnight, the humidity is so high it’s like the old saying, you could cut it with a knife. Right now my watch says it’s 29º but feels like 35º due to the 82% relative humidity and it’s not even 11AM yet.

I know that “feels like 35º” maybe doesn’t sound that hot, I mean I grew up in Virginia and in the “dog days of summer” it was always nasty. Usually around 40º and at least 70% relative humidity. So it was hotter and more humid, but at least you could look forward to winter. But it’s just hot, crazy hot feeling.

According to WBGT.sg [wbgt.sg], the closest weather station to me is reporting a wet bulb globe temperature of 36, which is… bad. It’s complicated but a WBGT of 36 is in the black zone, which means something like “don’t work outside”. If a place is consistently in this category it becomes hard for humans to live. Humans can live in much hotter places but the humidity has to be lower on average, I mean, how else could anyone live in the desert? To keep living in a place with a WBGT of 36 air conditioning is a must, and of course every minute you run the aircon you are contributing to further baking the planet.

Anyway, the whole point of this is it’s hot, fucking hot.

And it’s only going to get hotter. We have fucked the planet. We have fucked it so hard that a lot of places are at risk of becoming unlivable in my lifetime, or that of my kids. All our grand plans to “limit” global temperature rise to 1º or 1.5º are all for naught. We can’t get our collective shit together because of greed and shortcitedness.

Science has been talking about the greenhouse effect and the potential for human activity to raise global temperatures since at least 1902 (read the history of climate change science [wikipedia.org] on Wikipedia.) Here are two newspaper articles about how human’s burning coal was going to warm the world that are more than one hundred years old:

The only thing they got wrong was the timescale. We fucked it up much faster than “a few centuries”.

We’ve been debating if humans were the cause of climate change or global warming my whole life. And capitalism has trumped science every time. Despite the fact that the other day I saw an article that renewable energy now accounts for more then 30% of electricity supply [theguardian.com], (I don’t think that includes trains, planes and automobiles…) it’s too little to late. Then, a few days later the Scripps Institute of Oceanography published the latest Keeling Curve [ucsd.edu], showing how predictable it has become that shit gets worse every year:

This is the record of Atmospheric CO2 since 1958 then they started recording it at the Mauna Loa Observatory. There is a clear trend. And if you want to play the “it’s natural” bull shit game, take a look at some of the other diagrams. The 800 thousand year chart:

So there does seem to be some sort of cycle, but we kinda blew it out of the fucking water in the past 50 years. So yea, we fucked. And while we should celebratge the good, people should also know it’s too little to late.

We need to stop calling it “Climate Change” and start calling it “Climate Changed”, we geo-engineered our bed and now we have to sleep in it, without the aircon. And we can no longer pleed ignorance, not that that was ever an excuse, we know, we have known and we need to start figuring out how to live with it. Actually, I don’t even thing “Climate Changed” is the best, personally I prefer the older term, “Global Warming”, so from now on I’m going to call it “Global Warmed”. The pre-heating cycle is over, we can put the food in the fucking oven now.

Artist

Run the Jewels

Album

Run the Jewels 4

Release Date

June 3, 2020

I came late to RTJ [discogs.com], I first encountered them via DJ Shadow’s song “Nobody Speak” on The Mountain Will Fall [discogs.com]. Still one of their best songs —and their best videos [youtube.com], I would put it up there with Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice” [youtube.com] video. From there I discovered their back catalog and was eagerly awaiting RTJ4, listening to it from the day it dropped.

Run the Jewels 4 [discogs.com] gets a lot of praise as a soundtrack to the summer of protests over the death of George Floyd and the larger Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. The album was in fact released a few days early due to the ongoing protests. But, the protesting nature and the unfortunate an poingent way that RTJ4’s broad themes and specifics fit the death of George Floyd can’t really be called a coincidence. The issues aren’t new, the anger isn’t new. Even the death by suffocation a al cop isn’t new, the most disturbing line on the album, given the way George Floyd died comes midway through “Walking in the Snow” at the end of one of Killer Mike’s verses:

The way I see it, you're probably freest from the ages one to four
Around the age of five you're shipped away for your body to be stored
They promise education, but really they give you tests and scores
And they predictin' prison population by who scoring the lowest
And usually the lowest scores the poorest and they look like me
And every day on the evening news, they feed you fear for free
And you so numb, you watch the cops choke out a man like me
Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, "I can't breathe"

“I can’t breathe” could have been written about George Floyd, and indeed the song became a sort of cathartic rallying call, but it wasn’t about George Floyd. Killer Mike himself clarified on Twitter that, “that verse was rapped in 2019.” It is in fact referencing the last words of another black man killed by police; Eric Garner, whose death was filmed in 2014 in New York City. Despite the fact that this was national news in 2014 [cnn.com] and again in 2019 [cnn.com] when the Justice Department declined to try the officers, people seem to have forgotten it until George Floyds death.

Anyway, if you want to listen to more on the album’s place in the protests you should watch this video [youtube.com] by Polyphonic over on YouTube.

Sitting in Singapore the protests were half a world away for me, I wasn’t listening to RTJ4 because I was protesting. I like RTJ. I’m not a Rap or Hip Hop aficionado, I’ve always loved the Beastie Boys and I like me some Eminem, Outkast and others, but I could never really get into the genre, neither the great popular acts like Dr. Dre or Tu Pac, back in the day or Kendrick Lamar and Drake more recently nor the more underground greats like MF Doom. But RTJ hits the spot. I love Killer Mike’s flow, reminding me of Big Boi from OutKast. And Mike’s southern flow pair perfectly with El-P’s New York style. I’ve listened to both artists solo work and while it’s good I find the whole greater than the sum of its parts. I started with RTJ3 and worked my way backwards to 2 and 1, all great. But it seems that each album is surpassed by the next release and RTJ4 is my favorite. I can’t wait to hear Run the Jewels 5.

Ready to listen?

This [gizmodo.com] is the plot of a horror movie or the backstory for some post-apocalyptic story. Rich people illegally importing meat from an endangered species because it’s “the biggest” in the world and has massive horns, to clone it and breed hybrids for other rich people to trophy hunt… Fuck, we live in dystopian times. Today a rich asshole does it to create hunting trophies for other rich assholes. Tomorrow some terrorist does it to create something deadly to kill people, or to destroy the environment.